‘Bed-fellow’ coalitions the key to change
AFTER years spent channelling his efforts to combat the powerful influence of the Christian religious right in the US, Rabbi David Saperstein gave up. Instead, he came up with another, more novel solution: if you can't beat them, then find a way to join them.
CHANTAL ABITBOL
AFTER years spent channelling his efforts to combat the powerful influence of the Christian religious right in the US, Rabbi David Saperstein gave up. Instead, he came up with another, more novel solution: if you can’t beat them, then find a way to join them.
“It finally occurred to me that five-and-a-half million reform Jews [in the US] were never really going to win a battle with 80 million fundamentalist Christians,” said Rabbi Saperstein, director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Centre in Washington DC, for the past 30 years.
“It would be much better to find a way to coopt and drive wedges between them … and tear the grassroots away from the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons [evangelical leaders].”
In Sydney prior to the Parliament of the World’s Religions interfaith conference in Melbourne this weekend, the rabbi – described by Newsweek magazine as the most influential rabbi in the US in 2009 — took his message to interfaith leaders at roundtable discussions held at the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies’ office this Tuesday.
The turning point came, he said, in the early 1990s when the US Supreme Court struck down the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was intended to protect religious institutions from government infringement.
“We put together a remarkable wall-to-wall coalition to restore a high-level of protection legislatively, and we pulled in the religious right group,” Rabbi Saperstein recalled. “It was the first time we had sat around the table with each other, and we built some friendships and trust.”
From then on, he moved to engage the religious right to form what he coined “a bed-fellow” coalition, working on common interests — such as the persecution of religions across the world, southern Sudan’s civil war, the genocide in Darfur, debt relief and sex trafficking.
“I remember sitting in a room off the Oval Office with [U2’s] Bono on one side and Pat Robertson on the other side talking to [former President Bill Clinton] about why he needed to expand the debt-relief program,” he relayed with amusement. “It really led to a major expansion.”
“Of all the traditional interfaith relationships we have done, this is one strand [with the religious right] that really has been transformative,” he continued. “Whether it will hold up, I have no idea. But it has been one of the more interesting dynamics of the intersection between religion and politics.”
Most recently, Rabbi Saperstein was appointed by President Barack Obama as a member of the first White House Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, and in recent months he has been fighting a controversial measure in health reform that would further limit insurance coverage for abortion.
“This is a very difficult time,” he told The AJN. “We think the compromise that the House [of Representatives] made … is morally flawed and, on a policy basis, counterproductive.”
But overall, he said, there is a “good feeling” under the new administration. “The Jewish community [in the US] tends to be fairly liberal on political issues, and the Obama Administration obviously represents a set of political views much closer to [this] consensus than the Bush administration. So far, things have been helpful.”
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